Gasoline cars no longer make up most of the world’s new-car sales. They accounted for 49% of the global market in the first half of 2026, the first time their share has dropped below 50%.
The threshold had not been crossed since the 1920s, when cars began to become widely used. Gasoline vehicles held 73% of the market in 2021. Their share has since fallen 24 percentage points.
Sales of gasoline-powered cars fell 10% from a year earlier to 20.25 million units in the January-June 2026 period. Rising fuel prices were a factor in that retreat. OilPrice connected the fall in gasoline-car sales with higher oil, gasoline and diesel prices during the crisis around the Strait of Hormuz.
The decline was particularly sharp in two large markets. Gasoline-car sales dropped 26% year on year in China and 13% in Europe in the first half of 2026.
Electric vehicles, meanwhile, sold 6.87 million units globally, an increase of 12% from a year earlier. They took 17% of the overall new-car market, up 3 percentage points. The International Energy Agency said in July that global EV sales were 35% higher in the second quarter than in the first quarter.
Europe supplied the clearest reversal. EV sales overtook gasoline-car sales across 31 major European countries for the first time in the first half of 2026. European EV sales rose 32% to 1.81 million units. Sales of battery electric vehicles across Europe, including the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Norway, increased 52.2% year on year in August.
In Germany, battery-electric vehicle sales increased by 75%, and fully electric vehicles made up one-third of sales in August. Southeast Asian EV sales climbed 81% to 350,000 units in the first half of 2026. Oceania recorded 110,000 EV sales, 2.2 times the figure in the first half of the previous year. Electric-car sales in Brazil, India, Australia and Vietnam approximately doubled between March and June.
The picture was less uniform in China, which still accounted for about 50% of global EV sales. Its EV sales slipped 3% to 3.44 million units in the first half after tax breaks were scaled back in January. In North America, EV sales fell 15% after President Donald Trump withdrew preferential measures for EVs.
Yoshiaki Kawano, an analyst at Mobility Global, said relatively few EV buyers were returning to gasoline cars or hybrids, an indication that the change in purchasing patterns may last.
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